When I saw my mother have a healing of what is considered a...

When I saw my mother have a healing of what is considered a fatal disease through Christian Science treatment, I took a copy of Science and Health and read it from cover to cover. I did not understand all that I read, but I agreed with most of it. I accepted that God was the Father and Mother of man.

I asked a Christian Science practitioner to pray for me, as at the time I had only a few months until the delivery of my first baby. She agreed. Through our discussions I learned how to let go of the idea that I was a personal creator, and I turned my child over to God's care before she was born. The birth was harmonious and I delivered a healthy girl. During this time, as I read a passage in Science and Health with the marginal heading, "Scientific obstetrics," this statement stood out to me: "When this new birth takes place, the Christian Science infant is born of the Spirit, born of God, and can cause the mother no more suffering" (p. 463 ).

Twenty-two months later I had a healthy boy. A practitioner also helped me in prayer for this birth. All through their growing years these children proved the power of prayer in their own lives and had only Christian Science treatment for healing.

When my daughter was eleven years old, she woke one morning crying and in a great deal of pain. I went to her room, and she said she could not put one of her legs down on the floor to get out of bed. There was a line of discoloration on the leg that indicated blood poisoning.

I picked her up and we sat on the sofa and started to pray for God's healing messages. We knew that God created His children spiritually, and that our daughter was perfect. We found in Science and Health this statement: "Have no fear that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed as the result of a law of any kind, when it is self-evident that matter can have no pain nor inflammation" (p. 393 ). I picked up my Bible and held it in my hands; soon I opened it to Jeremiah 30, verse 17 , and read "I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord." Here was God speaking His Word to us! We knew we could trust Him, and that He was our only physician.

She then asked to sing some hymns. So I got the Christian Science Hymnal, and we started to sing. At first our voices were not joyous. But as we began to consider the spiritual meaning of the words in the hymns, we saw that their healing truths uplifted our thoughts. We began rejoicing, and praising God for His goodness and love for us. Psalm 95 says, "O come, let us sing unto the Lord: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation." Instead of fearing and doubting, we felt assured.

We knew a healing had come. My daughter got off the couch and walked without pain. The discoloration on her leg stopped advancing and then disappeared, and that was the end of the problem. A neighbor had seen my daughter's condition when she stopped by that morning, and she had been quite alarmed. She had witnessed many healings in our home, and therefore felt assured by our trust in God to heal the child. That same evening this neighbor saw our daughter out playing and came back over to share her joy and acknowledgment of God's healing power.

My son, at the age of six, was sent home from school by the nurse, who said he had a very serious case of impetigo and should be quarantined. She said that everything he touched must be destroyed, and that he could not reenter school unless he was examined and free of the disease.

On the way home we began Christian Science treatment; we both declared aloud the truth that he could not have anything that God did not send him; we knew that God did not inflict disease on His children, and we declared that God loved him and cared for this boy; God was all-power, and acknowledgment of this would erase disease from his experience.

When we got home I read Science and Health and found the message I needed on page 530: "The history of error is a dreamnarrative. The dream has no reality, no intelligence, no mind; therefore the dreamer and dream are one, for neither is true nor real." It was clear to me this was a dream about my son, and that he could wake up right then!

We found encouragement in the chapter "Prayer" in Science and Health in regard to the possibility of instantaneous healing.

This was Friday, and on Monday our son was examined by the same nurse. To her amazement, he was healed. She said this should have taken about a month to clear up—but that he could go back to school that same day.

I think the most wonderful thing about raising my children was that we never had any doubt that God could heal anything that needed to be healed. We were practicing preventative health care, and the children were not contracting all the so-called childhood diseases that were going around. They did not have one inoculation to prevent those diseases; for, as we read on page 62 in Science and Health, "The entire education of children should be such as to form habits of obedience to the moral and spiritual law, with which the child can meet and master the belief in so-called physical laws, a belief which breeds disease."

There is no better health care than Christian Science, and I am so very grateful I found it in time to raise my children.

Frances Hunt
Mountain Home, Arkansas